Indians mourn rape victim

Ben Doherty, Delhi

India mourns rape victim in vigils and protests

Indians gathered in their thousands in protests and candlelit vigils to mark the death in a Singapore hospital of a woman beaten and gang raped in New Delhi. Photo: Reuters

SHE has been dubbed ''Amanat'', a treasure kept in trust, ''Damini'', for a Bollywood movie heroine, and ''Nirbhaya'', or fearless.

But the signs at protests across the country have given her another sobriquet: ''India's Daughter''. In her anonymity, without a name, a village, a caste, she belongs to the whole nation.

Two weeks after the 23-year-old was attacked on a bus by six men, beaten with an iron rod and gang-raped for nearly an hour, the woman - her name still a closely-guarded secret - was cremated early on Sunday morning.

The Hindu cremation service was performed in the outer Delhi suburb of Dwarka before family members and a small number of friends.

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''I came because I really loved this girl. She was the brightest of all the girls in our neighbourhood,'' Meena Rai, a friend and neighbour, told reporters.

She was to be married in February.

''They had made all the wedding preparations and had planned a wedding party in Delhi,'' Ms Rai said.

Much of central Delhi remains on lockdown for fear of violent protests. But in the rest of the city and around the country, peaceful demonstrations continue, demanding more concern, and greater action, from police forces seen as apathetic and misogynist, and a political class viewed as uncaring.

The anger of the first few days after the woman's attack has given way to a period of national mourning. The furious protesters have been replaced by students walking in neat lines in complete silence.

There were calls for the death penalty when 40 or so members of Melbourne's Indian community gathered on the steps of the Indian consulate in St Kilda Road to pay tribute to the victim.

''They should not arrest the offenders or the accused and just hold them for a trial. They should shoot them on the spot,'' said 25-year-old lawyer Navjeet Jhaji.

A woman is raped in India every 22 minutes according to crime statistics, but this attack has exercised the country, and in particular its capital, like none before it.

At a protest in Jantar Mantar, in central Delhi, student Vijaya told Fairfax Media this victim represented all Indian women.

''This could be any one of us. Every woman in Delhi knows what it is liked to be grabbed, or for someone to say something filthy to us. This happens every day, we are not safe, ever.''

Numerous social forces are being blamed for the rampant sexual violence that occurs all over India, in particular the clash of the old country and the new.

Urbanisation has brought Old India, a deeply conservative, patriarchal rural society - half of all Indian families still live on small farms - into conflict with modern ideas about women, their right to an education, to work and a prominent place in society.

India has had a woman prime minister, and the most powerful person in the country today is Sonia Gandhi. But sons are still valued above daughters in India.

Girl foetuses are aborted and infant girls allowed to die. Boys are fed better and sent to school, while girls often go hungry and are kept at home.

The six men alleged to have committed the attack against this woman have all been arrested.

Most arrests involve men from rural villages, where rape is seen less as a crime than a risk girls run growing up. A common solution is to bully the girl into marrying her attacker.

But this case may be the one where India finally says ''no''.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has opened a commission of inquiry into the safety of women, and tougher penalties for rapists have been promised by government ministers, but the most significant change has come in the consciousness of the public, and in that of India's institutions.

Dozens of other attacks on women, usually barely reported, if at all, have become front-page news. Police forces, so often seen as part of the problem, are promising swifter, more sensitive action, in cases of sexual assault.

In Punjab, police who humiliated and intimidated the victim of a gang rape and refused to register her complaint or arrest her attackers have themselves been arrested. (The 17-year-old, however, killed herself the day before the arrests. ''They destroyed my life,'' she said in her suicide note.)

There is pressure for India's justice system, sometimes so slow-moving as to be almost irrelevant, to be fast-tracked for sex cases.

India has had moments of soul-searching before - displays of a remarkable solidarity in a country of more than a billion people of disparate wealth and circumstance.

A year ago, the country was unified behind a retired truck driver named Anna Hazare, who led massively popular hunger strikes against India's endemic corruption.

Tens of thousands of men took to the streets to declare that, ''I am Anna''. Twelve months on, Hazare's protests are forgotten, but the corruption lives on.

Protesters in Delhi are hoping, are demanding that their campaign against sexual violence will be different. ''There has to be change,'' Darshan Gupta told Fairfax at Munirka, near where the dead woman boarded the bus a fortnight ago.

''Too many people are angry - the government, the police, the people in power, they have to listen now.''

In Melbourne, Ravi Bhatia, former chief executive and founder of Primus Telecom in Australia, said sexual violence was an all too common occurrence in India.

''Tens of thousands of women in India are sexually harassed, beaten and brutalised, raped and murdered, denied justice and basic human rights,'' he told a small crowd on Sunday. ''We know what the problems are. Some of these are bad misogynist attitudes, indifference of the police towards protection and justice, and criminalisation of politics.''

Manoj Kumar organised the Melbourne event when he heard that the Delhi rape victim, a pysiotherapy student, had died.

''The Prime Minister is a very intelligent man but he doesn't want to say anything. He is surrounded by a mixture of parties and if they take the support away he is out of the picture. The law is blind, the police are deaf and our Prime Minister is mute.''

About 120 Indian-Australians gathered at Parramatta Park in Sydney, signing a petition calling for India's government to pass stronger laws to protect women and marking a moment's silence.

One of the organisers, Manbir Kohli, suggested those in attendance boycott travelling to India until personal safety could be ensured.

His 18-year-old daughter Naina, who grew up in Australia, said law changes had to be accompanied by cultural change.

''There's all these [Hindu] goddesses but if we seriously can't respect what we've got in front of us, what's the point?''